


LET HIS NAME BE NOT FORGOTTEN

by Mikkeneko



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Moving On, Spirit Cole (Dragon Age), all the things that come with cole's story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:07:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6208360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things that Cole needs to forget. There are some things that must not be forgotten. Sometimes, they're the same things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	LET HIS NAME BE NOT FORGOTTEN

 

 

There's a soldier in the barracks, more girl than woman, who hasn't slept through the night since Haven was destroyed. The dragon passed overhead, raining molten fire, and her entire squad was incinerated in a second; she survived only because she tripped and fell behind a stone wall. Every night she starts awake in tears, screams clawing at her throat, as she remembers their silhouettes against the flames. Every night, she wonders why the Maker took them all, but left her alive.

"You deserved to survive," Cole whispers to her, his voice unheard in the darkness. "It wasn't your fault. The others would have been glad you made it, not angry. Your life is worthy."

Words aren't easy for Cole, they never have been: meaning encoded in sounds, drop by drop. It would be so much easier without words. He can hear them so clearly. But they can't hear him the same way: he needs to use words if he wants to be heard. If he wants to help.

So he tries. It's easier when the words start the same, sound the same, when they slip and slide into one another. When they sing. He puts them into poetry, and they come a little easier.

The blacksmith's bones ache in the cold, joints grinding together with the weight of too many hammer-blows and too many years. It makes him grumpy and short with his apprentices, who shrink out of sight when he passes by. Cole nudges the page boys to chatter excitedly in his hearing about the ancient bathroom with the big claw tub they found in the abandoned part of the castle, heating runes still miraculously working after all this time. Tonight the blacksmith will soak himself in hot water for the first time in years, and he'll feel a little better...

Cole.

There's a kitten lost down one of the dark stone arrow-shafts; half-grown, he ventured away from his mother to explore and now he can't get back up. His lonely cries echo in the empty dark, and Cole urges one of the maids close enough to hear, to care, to fetch a basket and a rope...

"Cole."

One of Scout Harding's messengers took a blow to the head in skirmishing in the Arbor Wilds, and even now there's a ringing in her ears and a throbbing in her head that waxes and wanes but never really stops. It's not so bad, it's better than yesterday, I can bear it. She won't listen to Cole's encouragements, so instead he gets one of her friends to nag her, to plead with her to go see the healing mages...

"Cole." A whisper of anxiety, doubt and fear and shame: did I make a mistake? Was I wrong? Will he hate this, hate me? I don't want to make him even more unhappy...

That gets his attention. He turns around and sees the Herald standing there, waiting for him. He must have called his name several times, Cole thinks, before he heard it.

Names aren't easy for Cole, if only because humans have so many of them; they tangle up and overlap. First-name, Everard. Family-name, Trevelyan. Office-name, Inquisitor. Hurt-name, spellbind. Robe. Those names stick, they linger, long after the ones who said them are gone. But there's one name that hums and resonates on the lips of thousands on thousands all singing together, so that's the name Cole won't forget: "Herald," he says, happy to see him again.

The Herald smiles, and it's still like trying to look into the sun, the way the Fade sings in him, a choir and orchestra with the pounding bass drum of the anchor in his hand. But despite all the power literally at his fingertips, he's always been kind. Kind.

"Walk with me a bit, Cole," the Herald says, gesturing with his right hand, the real hand, not the Fade hand. "There's something I'd like to show you."

They walk together out into the courtyard, out of the shadows, into the light. The Herald leads and Cole follows, down stone stairs and over by the Keep wall. There's a statue there that wasn't there before, stone, grey, cold, and it takes Cole a long moment to try to figure out what he should be seeing.

It's not his own eyes that finally give him the truth, but the Herald's, because there are two figures before him and the shapes are the same. There's a him and then another him, up on the pedestal, floppy hat and stone bangs falling over blind blank eyes. The head is bowed, the arms crossed at the wrists, and there's an inscription carved into the stone at the base.

 

_LET HIS PAIN BE NOT FORGOTTEN,_

_LET HIS NAME BE NOT FORGOTTEN,_

_LET OUR SHAME BE NOT FORGOTTEN._

\-- and above that, four letters that make a sound, a word, a name, and Cole cries out as it completes the circuit, makes the connection, name matching word matching memory matching pain. "I don't want to remember!" he says, and falls back from the stone. The Herald catches his wrist before he can vanish, before he can forget. "I can't -- I can't remember this! Why did you make me remember?"

"Cole." A hand catches his other wrist, the Anchor anchoring him, holding him here, holding him down. Holding him to the memory. The herald's eyes are so kind, so full of sorrow. "I know it hurts, but please try to bear it for a moment more. Please let me explain."

That makes Cole pause; he could vanish, could forget (could make anyone forget, even the Herald) but he doesn't. "Why?" he demands. "I told you why I had to forget this. It hurts too much. It changes me…"

"I know." The hands tighten for a moment, then relax, back to holding him gently, like a baby bird. "It hurt you when you took on this form at first, didn't it? When you met the boy Cole in the dungeons of the White Spire, and took on his face and name?"

"Yes," Cole whispers. It had hurt _so much,_ and he hadn't been able to forget. "Rending, unmaking, unraveling, me. It made me different. It made me hurt." Hurt had been all he knew, then, hurting and needing to end it. He hadn't been able to dream of any other way, of any other helping.

"But you did it anyway," the Herald presses on. "You, a spirit of Compassion, took on a form that was pain itself. Why?"

Cole is silent for a long moment. He doesn't know. He's not sure he ever knew, only that it was something he _had_ to do. He remembers -- from both sides -- looking into the boy's eyes, into the spirit's eyes, hurting, fearing, hungering, thirsting, but more than anything else, yearning.

"I couldn't help him," Cole murmurs. "He hurt so much. His legs, broken… his stomach, his head, his heart. I tried to help him and… and I couldn't. But he didn't want to be alone. He was afraid to be alone. He was afraid to … disappear."

 _I'm going to die here,_ he remembers. _I'm going to die in the dark and no one will even know. No one will even care. No one will remember me, ever. They'll never face justice, they'll never regret it, they won't even remember it in a week. Please, if you're out there… if you're real…_

 _"Don't let me be forgotten,"_ Cole says, then and now.

"And he wasn't," the Herald says, tugging gently, pulling him back to the present, pulling him out of the dark. "You made sure of that, Cole. You sundered yourself, took on a form that almost destroyed you, just to make sure that his name and face wouldn't vanish from this world. That his story would be heard, that his pain would not be forgotten."

"Yes," Cole whispers.

"And now it's not." The Herald looks over at the statue, looks out around Skyhold. "Now everyone in the Inquisition knows, they know what the Templars have done, they know what _you_ have done. Now he will be remembered in stone. Now he will be properly mourned, his sacrifice will be honored. We can leave it as a warning, a promise to make sure it never happens again.

"You did it, Cole." The hands on his gently turn his wrists over, letting his hands rest in the Herald's, palms upwards. Open. Empty. "You succeeded. You won. You saved him. You can let _go_ now."

He stares at the Herald's hands. There are marks on his wrists, on his face, of places that were once wounds -- cut, chafed, bruised, bleeding a little more with every step. They aren't any more. They were healed, long ago; now there's only the scar that remains, scars to be worn with pride. _I survived this,_ it seems to say. _I'm alive._

The sky is healed, but there's still a faint green trace in the air where it once was not. It's not hurting any more -- no more demons fall from it, no more lightning strikes endlessly -- but it's still there. Like a scar in the sky. A reminder of something that was once broken, even if it's fixed.

This body isn't him any more, he knows that. He is Compassion. He is a spirit, not a man. Not a mage. Not a boy. He doesn't need long gangly limbs, straw-blond hair or pale eyes. He doesn't need floppy hats and patched boots. 

But he thinks, maybe he'll keep it anyway. A reminder of things that once hurt, but don't any more. And he'll be glad. 

"Yes," he says, and smiles.

* * *

 

~end.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't intend to write much in the Inquisition setting, but this idea took hold of me and didn't want to be let go. I chose the Spirit path for Cole (obviously,) and overall like that choice better, but it did make me very sad that Cole made himself forget the boy who had been.


End file.
